AI and Creativity: What Do The Artists Think? Benoit Carré Of SKYGGE

In the second of our series on AI and Creativity, Innovation Manager, Karim Fanous, presents some thoughts from Benoit Carré Of SKYGGE

In the run-up to our Abbey Road Red Demo Day 2020 we asked some of our brilliant artist friends if they could film a short video with their thoughts about AI and creativity, which we could show the audience. Now, with their permission, we’d like to share these films with you.

"I couldn’t have created this music without AI, but no one could have created this music except me." That’s my favourite line from Benoit at the end of this video. It says a lot about the way we’re thinking about creativity and artificial intelligence.

Sure, a clever tool can automate the process of creation or transposition to a degree or completely. But the human twiddling parameters to jam or track to or providing a sound input for the tool to riff on, transpose or re-interpret altogether makes it their own musical output. Their unique creation.

I also like that Benoit hints at AI tool prototypes which will be made available to the public. We’re going to see many of these sorts of tools drop in the next few years, whether mobile apps, DAW plug-ins or even housed in stomp boxes – there are quite a few out there already. It will be exciting to see what artists and producers do with them. How will they use them in new ways that they weren’t imagined for? What new sounds will they make or genres will they spawn?

Benoit is an AI music pioneer. In 2017 he released an album called Hello World, Composed With Artificial Intelligence under his SKYGGE moniker. The album’s creative flow was run through François Pachet’s Flow Machines AI. You can read about it including the creative process behind it, here.

On SKYGGE’s current release, American Folk Songs, Benoit went back to Flow Machines to help re-interpret traditional folk songs. You can listen to it here and see an example of how he used AI tools on it, here.